The corrected number, once tracking was fixed, was more than 5 times the reported figure.
Cut to near zero for 2 months starting in August.
Held steady the entire time PPC spend was off.
About 30% of the original spend, reinstated as a deliberate choice once the corrected data was in hand.
Our client, a foundation and waterproofing contractor, cut PPC ad spend to zero for 2 months to test what his sales team could do without it, and the test uncovered a tracking error that had been hiding his real return on ad spend the whole time.
Reid was getting a 1.8x return on ad spend from his PPC agency, thin enough to barely clear overhead, and the agency's own reporting had already been wrong once by $200,000 on a single lead source. Rather than negotiate over the number, he cut PPC spend to zero for a 30-day test to see what happened to sales without it. Revenue held at $700,000 a month while PPC spend sat under $1,000, and 2 months into the test, the agency admitted its tracking had been misattributing PPC-driven sales to a different channel the entire time. Corrected, the real return on ad spend came in at 9.6x, more than 5 times the reported figure.
Our client, a foundation and waterproofing contractor, had been paying his marketing agency to run his PPC campaigns. The agency was reporting a 1.8x return on ad spend, just $1.80 back for every dollar spent, thin enough to barely clear overhead before it reached profit. By August, that same agency had misreported results for the second time, this time overstating one lead source's performance by $200,000.
"Y'all are off $200,000 for one lead source. You're making decisions with tens of thousands of dollars on the line. I don't expect your data to be down to the dollar of mine, but we've got to be in the ballpark." — Reid, owner of a foundation and waterproofing company
A friend had his own warning. He'd pulled back from a marketing consultant a few years earlier and watched his leads drop hard afterward. He told Reid that cutting an agency loose, PPC or otherwise, was a mistake he shouldn't repeat.
Stuart's answer wasn't a defense of any single marketing agency.
"The problem with PPC is not the agency. The problem with PPC is Google. Fewer people are going to Google, so they have less inventory to sell, but they still have to hit their numbers. They're charging for clicks that are not converting." — Stuart Trier, Founder & CEO of Clear Results
Google's auction economics were working against every agency running paid search, this one included. That context didn't excuse the $200,000 reporting error. It meant Reid needed his own answer to whether PPC was worth the money, independent of any single number he couldn't verify himself.
Return on ad spend, or ROAS, measures how many dollars in sales a marketing channel generates for every dollar spent on it. A 1.8x ROAS means $1.80 back for every $1 spent, thin enough that most of it gets eaten by overhead before it reaches profit, and that number is only as trustworthy as the tracking behind it. In Reid's case, a misconfigured setting had been quietly attributing PPC-driven sales to a different channel for months, making a working channel look like a losing one. A vendor-reported number, unverified against your own numbers, can drive a real spending decision in the wrong direction.
Reid didn't wait for the agency to fix its reporting before making a decision. He ran 3 moves in sequence.
"I'm getting ready to cut PPC off completely for 30 days and test it. I know we'll see a drop in leads. Based on my current data, I don't think we'll see a drop in sales." — Reid
The 30-day window stretched to roughly 2 months, and Stuart later confirmed the total: "Last two months, we spent less than $1,000 on PPC."
Rather than cancel the relationship outright, Reid held the $200,000 discrepancy open as an unresolved question, pressing the agency for supporting data before he'd accept any revised recommendation at face value.
Once the real numbers were in hand, PPC got a fraction of its former budget. TV and other branded channels absorbed the difference instead.
With PPC spend near zero for 2 months, monthly revenue stayed exactly where it had been before the test: $700,000. Whatever the PPC agency had been contributing, it wasn't the difference between that number and some smaller one.
2 months in, the agency came back with a complication (they called it a "curveball"). A misconfigured setting had been counting PPC-driven sales as Google Business Profile organic results instead. Once the leads were correctly attributed, the campaign's real return on ad spend was 9.6x, comfortably above his own 8.3x cutoff.
Reid stayed skeptical even with the corrected number in hand. A higher ROAS didn't answer the question underneath it: was he quietly losing market share, or just paying more for leads he'd have gotten anyway?
This wasn't the clean vindication a simpler story would want. The corrected number argued for spending more on PPC, close to the opposite of what a 30-day blackout test sets out to prove.
Stuart stayed skeptical too:
"To me, PPC is where I'd cut. You're not getting the return." — Stuart Trier
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Return on ad spend | 1.8x (misreported) | 9.6x (corrected) |
| Monthly PPC spend | $18,000 | Under $1,000 during the test; $5,300 budgeted going forward |
| Monthly revenue | $700,000 | $700,000, held steady through the test |
| Data verification | Agency-reported numbers accepted directly | Reconciled against internal numbers before any budget decision |
| PPC share of marketing budget | 20-25% | Roughly 5-6% of a larger, TV-weighted budget |
High-ticket project trades run into this problem in slow motion. A foundation repair or roofing company might close only 15 to 20 jobs a month, which is thin enough that a bad ROAS number can hide in the sample size for months. Storm-damage referrals miscategorized under the wrong campaign are a common version of the same mistake in roofing specifically.
Plumbing and HVAC companies face the opposite problem: too much volume to notice, rather than too little. Running hundreds of service calls a month gives an easy excuse to wave off a declining ROAS as normal seasonal noise. When one HVAC business finally cross-referenced its ad platform's reported conversions with its own dispatch software, nearly a third of the "converted" leads were duplicate bookings from existing customers rather than new business generated by the ads.
Electrical contractors land in between: fewer leads than a plumbing or HVAC service line, but each one valuable enough that a tracking error compounds fast. One electrical contractor only caught a similar misattribution after manually cross-referencing 6 months of closed jobs against campaign data.
Treat a vendor-reported ROAS number as a starting point for a conversation. Verify it before treating it as fact.
Cross-reference the agency's reported conversions against your own CRM or job-costing data on a regular schedule, before a number ever looks suspicious. Reid's agency had misreported results twice before the underlying tracking error surfaced, and both times the mistake favored a conclusion that kept the ad spend flowing. Ask for the raw conversion data behind any recommendation, not just the summary number.
For most home service businesses, yes, provided the test has real guardrails. Track sales throughout the test, not just lead volume, since lead volume alone won't show whether the channel was driving revenue or just generating low-quality leads. Set the test length in advance and hold to it, so a nervous week 2 doesn't end the experiment before it produces a real answer.
It depends heavily on ticket size and margin, but many home service businesses use a rough floor of 8x to 10x before overhead and payroll are covered. Reid's business used 8.3x internally as the cutoff below which a channel needed review. Numbers below 3x to 4x on a paid channel usually warrant a closer look at tracking before assuming the channel itself is the problem.
There's no universal percentage, but Reid's business moved from PPC eating 20-25% of the marketing budget down to roughly 5-6%, redirecting the difference into brand channels like TV. The right split depends on how much of your paid search traffic converts versus how much is absorbed by brand searches you'd get for free anyway.
Outside marketing consulting or coaching earns its cost when a business owner needs a second set of eyes on vendor-reported numbers they don't have the tools or time to verify themselves. Reid didn't fire the agency. He kept it on retainer, pushed for straight answers, and checked their reporting against his own numbers before any decision moved forward.
Stuart Trier is the Founder and CEO of Clear Results. Over the past 20 years, Stuart has built, bought, and sold 11 companies across the home service, healthcare, and marketing industries. He built his first company from startup to $8M in revenue in 3 years before a successful exit, then built a chain of 28 healthcare clinics and sold the business to a publicly traded company. Following that acquisition, Stuart spent 3 years working alongside the CEO, helping lead the organization through a take-private transaction before participating in a nine-figure exit to a Fortune 10 company. Today, he's the lead investor behind an electrical services platform operating across 3 U.S. states, and has worked directly with owners through 1,800+ strategic advisory sessions.
